09/09/2010

Review: 'The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration' By Isabel Wilkerson

“The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration” By Isabel Wilkerson Random House, $30.00, 620 pages

Reviewed by Kevin Boyle, special to the Tribune

In the spring of 1941photographer Russell Lee spent several days documenting African-American life on Chicago’s sprawling south side. He took one famous photo, an Easter morning shot of five boys dressed in elegant suits and ties, homburgs in their hands, posing on the hood of a Packard Six. But he captured others images too: of a rag man pulling his cart past modest shop fronts; a young girl doing laundry in a cold-water flat; two little boys standing in a rubble-strewn lot, staring at a dead dog a few feet in front of them. Prosperity and poverty, hope and despair, side by side on the streets of Bronzeville.

Those are also the themes that thread through Isabel Wilkerson’s mesmerizing new book, “The Warmth of Other Suns”, a history of the Great Migration -- the mass movement of six million African Americans from the south to the north in the middle decades of the twentieth century – told through the lives of three people who joined the exodus.

Wilkerson, a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, chose her subjects partly to illustrate the migration’s diversity. But what makes the book compelling is the remarkable intimacy of the stories she tells; her ability to recreate, in wonderfully lyrical prose, the private struggles of particular men and women caught in a system designed to denigrate them. Ida Mae Gladney worked alongside her share-cropper husband in Mississippi’s cotton fields, desperately poor people living in one of the most oppressive places in America, until a night of violence in October 1937 convinced them that they couldn’t take it anymore. Within a couple of days they were on their way to Chicago. Eight years later George Swanson Starling got into trouble trying to unionize fruit pickers in central Florida. Fearing for his life he fled to New York. And on Easter Monday 1953 Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, MD – a product of Morehouse, Meharry Medical School, and the Army medical corps -- packed up his practice in Monroe, Louisiana and headed west, determined to trade the humiliations of Jim Crow for the freedom of southern California.

But migration wasn’t as liberating as the migrants hoped it would be. Wilkerson traces out the collision between her subjects’ ambition – their common trait, she says – and the harsh realities of life beyond the Mason-Dixon Line. In Chicago African-Americans were invariably funneled into the long, narrow ghetto that ran from 22nd Street down past Hyde Park; in New York they were pushed uptown to Harlem. Wilkerson dutifully describes the vibrancy of those neighborhoods: the bustling businesses that lined South Parkway, the spectacle of Seventh Avenue, “the lace-curtain brownstones up on Sugar Hill”. But it wasn’t the ghetto’s glitter that shaped most migrants’ experiences. What mattered most were the burdens that hyper-segregation imposed.

The Gladney family ended up living in a dilapidated basement flat, the Starlings in a tenement apartment. And when they went looking for work, they ran into a job market almost as discriminatory as the south’s. It took the Gladneys years to find steady employment, Ida Mae as a nurse’s aide, her husband as a laborer in a can factory, while George Starling hired in as a baggage handler on the trains that ran up and down the east coast. Once trapped in the ghetto it became incredibly difficult to escape. In 1967, three decades after coming north, the Gladneys finally bought a home of their own in a white area just south of the black belt, only to watch their new neighbors sell their houses en masse and race to the suburbs. “Lord, they move quick,” Gladney said to Wilkerson years later. Starling, meanwhile, saw his family give way to the temptations of the street, his daughter pregnant at fourteen, his son feeding his heroin addiction by stealing whatever he could from his parents.

Robert Foster’s life followed a dramatically different trajectory. Within a few years of settling in Los Angeles he had a thriving practice, thanks to his skill, his relentless self-promotion, and the publicity that came from treating his most famous client, a musician by the name of Ray Charles. No matter how much he achieved, though, Foster couldn’t stop trying to prove his worth. In one of the book’s most affecting scenes, Wilkerson describes the lavish party he threw for himself on Christmas Day 1970, catering by L’Escoffier, service by a small army of maids and waiters, music by Hampton Hawes. First thing the following morning he was on the phone to his friends from back home, begging to hear how impressed they’d been, the ghosts of Jim Crow haunting him still.

It’s from such unflinching details that “The Warmth of Other Sun”s draws its power. In the end, though, Wilkerson herself seems to blink, arguing that, despite the struggles she so beautifully describes, the Great Migration was nothing less than the fulfillment of the American Dream as the migrants themselves defined it. To make the case, she gives her stories the best possible spin. Yes, she says, Ida Mae Gladney was victimized by a white flight that left her neighborhood impoverished, crime ridden, and drug infested. “But she lived in the moment, surrendered to whatever the day presented, and remained her true, original self.” Yes, George Starling lost his family, but he won “a psychological freedom from the bonds of his origins.” Yes, Bob Foster “nursed ancient wounds until the day he died. But he would have had it no other way” .

The story is more complicated than that. The Great Migration did help to break the back of southern segregation, as Wilkerson contends. But it also highlighted the racism that cut through Chicago, New York and Los Angeles just as it cut through Louisiana and Mississippi. You can see it in the photos that Russell Lee took in the spring of 1941. You can see it in the three good people who stories unfold in this profoundly moving, often heartbreaking book. And you can see it in the forgotten neighborhoods of America’s greatest cities every single day.

Kevin Boyle teaches history at Ohio State University. His book, “Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights and Murder in the Jazz Age”, received the Chicago Tribune’s Heartland Prize for non-fiction.

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You won't read anything like this in any account of U.S. History. Only gain a deeper appreciation of those many emigrants. After reading this book, I am so grateful to my granparents for having the courage to leave the South and try to have a better life. It is almost unbelievable the indignities these people went through. But it is also
encouraging to read about their success as well. This is honest history at it's best. An amazing written work. All I can say is read it. You will think, now I get it.